Hollywood A-listers pay Martyn Lawrence-Bullard a fortune to decorate their
homes. As he tells Celia Walden, a tasteful interior is always
available – at the right price.

'Somebody very famous once asked me to gold-leaf the interior of their garage from floor to ceiling,” says Martyn Lawrence-Bullard, his matinee-idol features not betraying the faintest sign of outrage. “I said, 'I’m very sorry’,” he goes on in a smooth transatlantic monotone, “'but I can’t do it. It’s ridiculous, excessive and vulgar, and I won’t put my name to it.’ So they fired me. But that was perfect because I was going to fire them anyway.”

As the go-to interior decorator for every A-lister in Los Angeles and beyond, not much shocks the 45-year‑old these days.

He has personalised palaces for Sir Elton John, Cher, Eva Mendes, Aaron Sorkin, the Osbournes and Tamara Mellon, the Jimmy Choo founder. He was named one of the world’s top interior designers by Architectural Digest, and has his own collection of fabrics, wallpaper, furniture and rugs.

Next month he will host a new television show for Channel 4, called Hollywood Me. In it, he takes a “deserving” member of the British public to Hollywood, gives them the time of their lives and redesigns their homes with the help of his celebrity friends. He does it “in order to keep the dream alive”.

“It’s my opportunity to celebrate the power of design and show people how it can change your life. You don’t have to have mega-bucks to get a million-dollar look,” Lawrence-Bullard tells me from his semi-recumbent position on the couch of his LA home.

Home is a Mediterranean villa in Whitley Heights, one of LA’s first celebrity enclaves.

'She wanted to be an Indian princess': Cher's Malibu home

“I’m a full service industry. Not full, full service,” he cautions, shooting me a lascivious look, “but generally speaking, gold-leafed garages aside, I do what my clients want.

“Another celebrity asked me to design a mirrored wall that popped open to reveal a black, leatherette-lined sex room. I had to send one of my assistants to the Pleasure Chest [a Hollywood sex shop] to acquire a very peculiar piece of equipment. She left me shortly afterwards,” he chuckles.

“But you know, pleasing the client is what it’s all about. The room ended up so beautiful. It had black, latex panel walls covered in little silver studs. It looked like a Chanel boutique – even if, actually, it was for the pleasures of the flesh.”

In LA, people feel they have a right to live out their fantasies, Lawrence-Bullard explains, and unless he considers those fantasies actively brand-damaging, it’s his job to make that happen.

“Cher wanted to be an Indian princess,” he smiles, “so we created an Indian temple for her.”

Sir Elton wanted to live in “a floating jewel box” so he and David Furnish set about making that esoteric vision a reality.

This home for supermodel Cheryl Tiegs in Bel-Air was one of the first celebrity houses Martyn designed

When Sharon Osbourne had enough of heavy Gothic chic, she invited Lawrence-Bullard to shake things up. His job was to turn her and Ozzy’s New England-style Hollywood Hills home into a French country farmhouse. Albeit with a cutting-edge recording studio in the basement.

He is proud enough of these projects to have included them in his glossy coffee-table book, Live, Love and Decorate. The book also features images of his own home, once owned by Gloria Swanson and then by William Faulkner, “who wrote all his screenplays on the balcony of the master bedroom”.

The process behind the sumptuous interior landscapes in his book, however, is less seamless than the photographs lead you to believe.

Money is no object for most of his clients. “Twenty-six million [£17 million] is the largest I’ve ever been given for a house, and $50 million [£32.5 million] for a hotel, including the art.”

But stratospheric budgets also come with similar-sized egos.

“When you’re in a situation where clients are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, people can panic,” he says. “Celebrities are a different race. You have to deal with the assistant and the stylist – that can make life difficult.

“Even in my way of being a tiny bit famous, that happens. I have to have a manager and an attorney, because everybody tries to sue you. What you’re doing is so personal. You get to know what these people have in their underwear drawers, literally. You’re not just decorating their homes, you’re designing their lives.

Kid Rock’s son’s room, in Malibu

“Oscar-winners have called to ask me what they should wear that day. Some people even ask me to fill their fridges. One day you’re a therapist, other times you’re a marriage counsellor. Often you’re between a husband and a wife, who are arguing over blue and pink. You just hope that you can agree on green.”

He pauses and throws me the kind of pregnant look that precedes a nice, fat indiscretion.

“I have a client at the moment who, every time I take her shopping, points to the single ugliest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” He takes a quick sip of his champagne, as though anxious to cleanse a sullied palate.

“Everybody thinks they have good taste.” He laughs. “Taste isn’t about one particular style, because you can mix all sorts of different things together and get fabulous results. But you’ve either got it or you haven’t. You can’t learn taste. But you can buy it.”

He breaks into what Ozzy Osbourne has described as his “ka-ching!” smile, so convinced is he that his wife spends all their money on the decorator’s services.

Lawrence-Bullard’s father was an opera singer-turned-businessman from London. As a “precocious brat of a 12-year-old”, Lawrence-Bullard bought antique porcelain and silverware from Chislehurst Market, in Kent, and sold them on at a profit at Greenwich Flea Market.

Having decided to follow his father on to the stage, he bought and sold antique jewellery to pay his way to the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, in New York. At 23, he set off for Hollywood. He secured the odd role here and there, on one occasion playing Eartha Kitt’s toyboy love interest. He also “did the crazy thing of pretending to be a waiter until I blew up the cappuccino machine and they fired me.”

Still, his droll conversation and ebullient character earned him important friends along the way. One was the actress Lorna Luft, Judy Garland’s daughter. “I decorated her apartment, and from there it all took off by word of mouth.”

Ellen Pompeo’s (from 'Grey’s Anatomy') bathroom in Hollywood. The flooring is French terracotta tiles, while the ladder is 19th century Chinese and is used to hold towels

After he sat next to cover girl model Cheryl Tiegs at a party, she hired him to create a “crazy” Balinese pavilion in the hills of Bel Air.

When it comes to his achievements since, Lawrence-Bullard has an absence of modesty that is peculiarly endearing (after all, who wants an interior decorator filled with self-doubt?).

It’s not so much that he can’t believe his luck as the consummate certainty that he can do what he does better than anyone else. Looking at him now, svelte and debonair in a fitted waistcoat and jeans, it’s impossible to begrudge him a success he clearly relishes.

That success is evident from the romance of his carefully choreographed home, and from the modelesque producer boyfriend Michael Green, who comes in to refill our flutes.

Not to mention the chef doing something extravagant-sounding in the kitchen in preparation for a dinner party that night. (“Either there’s a dentist in the kitchen or the chef’s arrived.”)

As someone who has a list of celebrity friends almost as long as his client list, how does he conceal his dismay at their choice of decor when invited over?

“There are definitely assaults on the senses,” he winces. “When you live in LA, you end up meeting everybody. Sometimes you’ve spent your whole life looking up to somebody and when you go to their house you’re absolutely horrified.”

He is still reeling from a sighting of Christina Aguilera’s new home on a television show he contributed to the night before.

“I decorated Christina’s pad when she was 19, and it was fabulous,” he laments. “Very Marilyn Monroe and old Hollywood, all white with mirrored furniture and fur rugs and a lacquered piano.

“In the place we saw last night there were these weird splodges of Pepto-Bismol pink everywhere. I was really shocked.”

The truth is that for every Martyn Lawrence-Bullard, there are probably 10 Pepto-Bismol splodge merchants in the LA interior-design world.

Which is why a little bit of free parting advice for those of us without a few billion to spare is welcome. “Buy brass,” he enthuses. “Brass furniture and brass taps: brass is the new black.

“Bin the Mad Men midcentury trend – you see that look everywhere now. Switch to Sixties and Seventies glam.

This is all about big, loungy sofas and sexy one-off pieces such as Tamara Mellon’s coffee table, the inside of which can be emptied, filled with ice and turned into a giant champagne-cooler.

“My office is ultra-Sixties, with amazing pieces of chrome furniture and lots of Lucite. It works with every period.”

Learning to understand scale is vital when decorating your home. Antiques – after a long period in the wilderness since the recession – are the way forward.

“You’re going to see a real return to that Regency, Georgian influence that has been so unfashionable for the past decade. All those beautiful buildings in England that were stripped down with the mouldings removed in order to make the walls suede or whatever was great at the time, but it was never going to last.”

The doorbell rings, announcing the first of his dinner guests. Martyn shrugs. Ultimately, he explains, he sticks by the same mantra he learnt all those years ago at the flea markets of Chislehurst.